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5 top security agents arrested in killing of leading dissident

KAZAKHSTAN — Five members of an elite unit within Kazakhstan's national security service, the KNB, have been arrested in connection with the killing of a leading opposition figure last week.

Altynbek Sarsenbayev, who had accused President Nursultan Nazarbayev of quashing dissent and moving the country toward authoritarianism, was found dead with his bodyguard and driver outside the Kazakh city of Almaty. All had been bound and shot in the back.

"Five servicemen from KNB's Arystan forces have been arrested in connection to . . . the murder," the National Security Committee, the successor to Kazakhstan's Soviet-era KGB, said in a statement. The security service "is working to establish all real participants of the murder and to trace all `werewolves in epaulets' in its ranks."

The reference to werewolves comes from a Russian expression describing corrupt police and security officials.